The Ants That Ate Plutarch

They say music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, but it was the writings of Plutarch, Aristotle and Henry James that was sent to tame the Northern Territory town of Borroloola - a bush town 60 kilometres from the sea on the South-west Gulf of Carpentaria - on the north coast of Australia.Books and Writing presents a Jan Wositzky documentary feature about the Borroloola library. As part of the Summer Series, this is a repeat of the program originally broadcast in June last year.Jan spoke to songwriter Ted Egan, historian Peter Forrest and writer Nicholas Jose. From the archives he brings us the quintessential Borroloola character, Roger Jose, interviewed by David Attenborough in his 1963 film The Hermits of Borroloola, as well as some vintage Bill Harney.

Transcript

Bill Harney: When I was there they had a very big library. Oh, they had thousands of books. They tell me there's a chap called Corporal Power, and way back in the eighties or something he was there and he sent away and got a grant from the Carnegie people. And they got this library. It was full of the most amazing books. There was books there you'd hardly believe. They were old books that were sent to them at that time. So the library was full of them. There the people used to come in and read these 'ere books, and for a long time they looked after 'em and out of 'em there was Gibbons, you know, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and all these great books was there. And the bushies used to lay under the old pear trees and down under the casuarina trees on the rivers and all these fresh-water mangroves, and they'd read these 'ere books and they'd take 'em back into the library.

So gradually Borroloola fell into decay and the library started to-nobody looked after the books and people used to take 'em out into the bush and never return 'em and some of them got old that when they'd turn a leaf over it'd crackle and they'd throw it away. And gradually it went lower and lower and people took away books-'loaned' 'em, as they call it-got a loan of them and never brought 'em back. And the other day I was down in Borroloola-when I say the other day, about four year ago, which is nothing-I went down and the last lot of the books was in one of the old gaols. I knew the place because it was one that I'd been in before, the old gaol, there they were stacked in this place and there was only a few hundred. All in this 'ere place. I seen 'em there. I seen Miles Franklin's book, you know, the first book she wrote with that foreword by Henry Lawson, the first edition of it, you know. It's a strange thing. They were all there.

Jan Wositzky: That was yarn spinner and writer Bill Harney on the legendary Borroloola library. I've also been to Borroloola and it was that story of the Borroloola library that dragged me there. How back at the turn of the nineteenth century three thousand leather-bound books arrived in Borroloola by boat-there being no road to the town-and how those books were housed in the only place in town that could accommodate them, which was the gaol.

But by the first time I got to Borroloola, in 1982, the gaol was gone and all I could find was the old disused police station, a run down pub which was closed, doubled-up as a store; a petrol pump which was locked, and a few demountables that doubled as the school. All of them were closed till Monday.On that first Sunday, the only person I could find was an old fella who sat outside the pub with his testicles dangling out of his shorts into the grass. He said his name was Ding Dong, and, 'The library, mate? You've missed 'er. The white ants. They ate the lot.'

So I drove down to the river and I slung my tent beneath the paperbark trees. I'd been told that beneath these trees, once, every Sunday the old timers used to hold debates on topics like: Marx, right or wrong? Or, Should Henry James be taken seriously? If only those paperbark trees could talk.

That night by my camp fire I could picture the library, but in the light of day there was no sign of it ever having existed, except in stories. Another writer who's been to Borroloola is Nicholas Jose. In his new book Black Sheep, to be published in September 2002, he tells his story of the Borroloola library. When we talked, I said to Nicholas that to me sometimes the Borroloola library seemed less of a reality and more of a dream.

Nicholas Jose: Exactly. And because it's not there and the evidence is rather scanty, the story grows in the telling. And it becomes almost like an imaginary library. An ideal library with all of the world's riches of knowledge contained in it. And then contained in the heads of these people who lived out there, turning their back on one world in order to explore and find ways of co-existing with another.

Jan Wositzky: And an earlier writer who went out there was Ernestine Hill. She went there in the nineteen thirties and she accounted for the place in her book, The Great Australian Loneliness.

I was bound for Borroloola, 'where the roads turn back,' the last, lost outpost of the Territory, away on the Gulf of Carpentaria, where there were five white men marooned for forty years among five thousand blacks.

I could pick up a ship at Thursday Island to connect with her at the mouth of the Albert River, and come back a thousand miles to the Roper and Borroloola.

'But what do you want to go to B'r'loola for?' they wanted to know, with the accent on the 'loola.' 'There's nothing down there but blacks. Except for the policeman's wife, they've not seen a white woman round there for six years, and then it was only a missionary.' 'That's why,' I said.

Jan Wositzky: Over 1000 miles on the sea and 45 miles up the McArthur River, Ernestine Hill finally got to Borroloola in the middle of the wet. There she found four residents, 'all white males,' she said, and 'a surprise.'

Closed in by jungle and forgotten of men, I stumbled upon a library of three thousand books. The finest and most comprehensive library in the north. Peering through the dusty windows of the old courthouse at myriads of canvas covered volumes, I could scarcely believe them true. The library became a kindly light of sanity to men half mad with loneliness.

: And another who once lived at Borroloola was the bard of the Northern Territory, Ted Egan. And it was Ted Egan who first told me about the library, and also of a man there called Roger Jose-the namesake of Nicholas Jose, and we'll come back to that soon-but in 1916 Roger Jose walked to Borroloola from Cunnamulla in Queensland, then read the entire library: Aristotle, Socrates, Gray, Browning and everything else-and never left.

I was enthralled to hear that Roger, when welcoming strangers to this river bank town of learning and knowledge, would offer them bush champagne and if they accepted he would pull out a couple of pannikins, a bottle of metho and a jar of sal volatile. And if after drinking the bubbly you were still alive, he would cast a spell for you by reciting the Rubiyat of Omar Kyam.

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall Lure it back to cancel half a Line,Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

That inverted Bowl they call the Sky,Whereunder crawling coop't we live and die,Lift not your hands to It for help - for It As impotently moves as you or I.

Ted Egan also heard Roger Jose recite Virgil in Latin. Ted first came to Borroloola as a patrol officer in the Natives Affairs Branch-the first government organisation set up to administer, or as Ted now puts it, control the lives of Aboriginal people. Ted and I, not long ago, had a conversation about the library and Borroloola.

Ted Egan: I went there first in '53 but I felt I knew a lot about the place before I went there.

Jan Wositzky: Because there's always stories about Borroloola?

Ted Egan: Absolutely, I was recruited into the old Native Affairs Branch in Darwin and no-one had anything specific in mind for me to do and I used to read avidly all the files, particularly the patrol officers' files, and I read all Bill Harney's files and all of Ted Evans's files and Borroloola featured prominently in all of their writings and that was obviously an exciting place. I was a cadet patrol officer, which was pretty unimportant, but had the opportunity to drift around the bush more or less at my pleasure and Borroloola was down on the agenda very early in the piece because it was obviously an interesting place from an Aboriginal point of view and there was obviously a very interesting white population or other population as well.

Jan Wositzky: What was in their reports?

Ted Egan: Ted Evans had spent some time in the early fifties at Borroloola. He reported on the deterioration-almost total deterioration-of the old library, which he always called the Carnegie library. I don't know why. Bill Harney called it the Carnegie library and so I always have. The story around Darwin was that at around the turn of the century a police constable was posted to Borroloola and wasn't terribly enchanted about that and wrote to the Carnegie Institute in the United States and the story was that there was involvement by the Governor General, Hopetoun, and that was always the story handed down to me and I was very happy to accept such a romantic story and embellish over the years and the story still was that three thousand leather-bound classic books arrived at Borroloola carefully packed in trunks, bestowed by the Carnegie Institute.

But I lived in the police station. The police station was quite a nice old house except it was full of snakes, and the cell block hadn't been used-this is where I found the few old, dusty covers-now it wouldn't have been big enough to hold three thousand books for sure-so maybe there was another building that I don't know about.

Jan Wositzky: Now I've seen the remains of the cell block, which is like a concrete slab about the size of an average kitchen. And in the middle there's a ring. It's a very small space to have a lot of books, isn't it?

Ted Egan: Oh, certainly wouldn't have held anything like three thousand. But I would think that the police station would have been the place, because in early days they'd have been single police and probably sleeping in a swag and there was a typical big verandah all round and two quite large rooms and-oh there was another building. As always, the kitchen was out separated from the homestead, so that made three buildings, and I would think there'd be plenty of room for a substantial library.

Jan Wositzky: In Ted Egan's time, Borroloola was a relatively stable town compared to earlier in the century when it was wild and woolly. It was, said some, inhabited by the scum of Australia, and the Northern Standard reported that the place was full of brumby runners from the Culvert rivers and characters with names like Billy the Informer. So I imagine the policeman's survival depended on a steely eye or a corrupt nature.

That first enlightened policeman was Cornelius Power, and in our conversation, Ted and I were joined by the Darwin-based historian, Peter Forrest.

Peter Forrest: Well he was a mounted policeman who had come up to the Territory in the early days from South Australia. He was transferred out to Borroloola in 1885. Now the town was just a year old at that time and it was a pretty wild and woolly sort of a place because it was then a stopping place on the Queensland road. All of the overlanders bringing cattle across from Queensland to form the new stations of the Top End came around this route which brought them past Borroloola, where there were several shanties selling sly grog and stores selling provisions, and it was at that stage the closest equivalent to a Wild West town, I think, that Australia ever had.

But Power appears to have been very lonely out there and he began writing letters to people in the south, crying out desperately that Borroloola needed some books for a library. What was called the Borroloola Institute was formed in those years. It later became the McArthur River Institute. And that Institute and another place we might call a school of arts-it was a community-based organisation with the objective of enhancing the education of ordinary people by self-help means-and Power thought this would be a good thing in Borroloola, and wanted to get some books.

So he fired off letters, for a long time without any result, to all sorts of dignitaries throughout Australia, hoping that someone might help him get some books. Well what happened was that the Governor of Victoria, Lord Hopetoun, who just at the relevant time was just in the process of becoming Australia's first Governor General, he took up this cause and he organised from Victoria the mobilisation of a stock of books. First of all a thousand books, and that was later added to, and these were sent up by launch and they arrived in 1901, ironically just after Power had been transferred out of Borroloola and back to Darwin. It must have been an incredible sight to see this launch arrive-and I suppose all the locals were hoping for it to be filled with flour, tobacco and rum. Instead of that it had a thousand books on board, and these books were put in the courthouse and served as the Borroloola library.

Jan Wositzky: Couldn't it have been possible that we had the rum and the books?

Jan Wositzky: How would the books have got from-like the boat arrives-there's no roads up to town?

Peter Forrest: No road at all. I mean even in Ted's time, fifty years later, there wasn't much in the way of a road, and certainly at the turn of the century all transport was by river, so these boats would have come up the coast from Melbourne probably to Thursday Island and they would have been trans-shipped there to a small coastal launch, which serviced these isolated places like Borroloola.

Jan Wositzky: All under sail?

Peter Forrest: No. It would have been a steam-powered launch and it would have navigated its way around from Thursday Island, across the Gulf of Carpentaria, up the McArthur River. It was probably guided up the McArthur River by an Aboriginal pilot named Harry, Pilot Harry, whose job it had been to survey and mark the river and find the way through the shoals and rocks and so on. But this was quite a common means of transport in the Territory at that time, because many of these places were so remote, so distant from roads, and overland transport was so difficult, that it was much easier to use the rivers as highways and that was the case with Borroloola.

Jan Wositzky: And the boat arrives and in the hold is to start off with a thousand leather-bound books.

Peter Forrest: And that was soon added to and we got to the point where we had three thousand volumes at one stage. Certainly there were about three thousand volumes there by the time that Bill Harney arrived in about 1920. Bill Harney had been sentenced to a term of imprisonment for cattle stealing. He was subsequently exonerated on appeal, but while he was waiting for the appeal he was held in custody in Borroloola. And he read his way through a great part of this Borroloola library and I think that was very significant in our literary history, because Harney's certainly one of the greatest writers about the people and places of the North, and I think his interest in writing and his ability to write was stimulated by that spell he had with nothing to do but read his way through this amazing library.

Jan Wositzky: By the time he died in 1962, Bill Harney had written about twelve books about the Northern Territory and many times he'd broadcast on ABC Radio and overseas about life in Australia. In 1957, when they 'created' Ayres Rock as a national park, he was made the first ranger.

He was five foot three and it's said that he never stopped talking. And so in my other life as a performer, I've played Bill Harney on stage. And when it came to this time in the Borroloola library, reading whilst he was in gaol, he said:

Oh well there were five of us, barefoot and bearded men, facing the JPs, and the case was heard and I was bored with the whole thing and I was glad when they took me to gaol and-ah, that was a gaol indeed. The Borroloola gaol was fourteen foot by twelve with only one window and a bench running around the wall about eighteen inches above the concrete floor and then at the centre- a relic of the hard old days-a huge iron ring used for tying the native prisoners' neck chains to in the past.

And for three months in this scorching summer we lived and we slept in that gaol and only reading, thanks to the library, kept us on top and we ate and we read and we survived. And I can look back on those days in that gaol as one of the turning points of my life. It was no prison to me. Within its narrow walls I travelled far-struggling along the old Silk Road, across Tibet with Marco Polo, sailing the Pacific with Magellan and travelling through the jungles of South America and off to the South Pole with Shackleton. I sailed and I travelled everywhere and then as night fell and we couldn't read any more, we would discuss, far into the night, the things we had read about during the day.

Later in his life, Bill Harney said when he travelled round the bush he would find a copy of Shakespeare in an Aboriginal camp; there because of the pretty pictures. He would find a copy of the Bible used to light a campfire and in the dunny of the Borroloola pub he found Plutarch-where he sat there reading the Laws of Solon until he heard footsteps shuffling without and hastily he would hide the book away for future reading.

But the man that introduced Bill to the library first up was a bloke called Old Scrutt, and it was said in Borroloola that Old Scrutt had read the library three times over. I asked Peter Forrest and Ted Egan what they thought about Old Scrutt.

Peter Forrest: I don't think the library was particularly big at that stage, but yeah, that is said about Scrutton. I think all of this is an extension of-or an example-of the way in which literature and the opportunity to read was treasured by bush people in times gone by. Particularly in this period of the Sydney Bulletin. You know, I think that if you'd looked in the saddlebag of just about every overlander that went through Borroloola you would have found a book, or at least a magazine, of some description. And those reading materials were their furniture, if you like.

So I think that wherever you went, there was this debate. There was this intellectual activity. It's just that Borroloola created special opportunities because there were so many books there and of course for many people who came to camp there, there was nothing much else to do but read.

Ted Egan: Collins, in Such Is Life has constant reference to 'Have you got a borrow book?' It was practice to have a book that you'd read that you may even have committed to memory, then if someone else wanted to borrow it, or a swap, that was very common in Australia in the bush in the old days. Whenever I travel, I always have what I call my 'breakdown book' because I'm not a very good mechanic and if I break down I think, now if it's simple I can probably fix it; if I can't I'll just pull out a chair and a bottle of rum or something and read my book. And someone'll come along.

It also extended into things like memorising Melbourne Cup winners and-it was sort of an extension of the same old stuff.

Peter Forrest: And an extension too, I think, Ted, perhaps of the oral tradition of knowledge keeping among Aboriginal people, where it's passed on and very strictly maintained and reinforced and memorised. I think the white bushmen were a bit in that same mould. It was a way of keeping and passing on knowledge.

Jan Wositzky: From the river bank in Borroloola, I began to meet local Aboriginal people. Some I met were said to be named after Alexander the Great. One day I had a yarn with Alexander's brother, Lenin. Of course, Ted knew many more who were so named.

Ted Egan: Every Aboriginal's got an identity from the time of conception, and they have various names that are their private property in Aboriginal society, but white people bestow on them-or Aboriginals themselves invariably take a whitefella's name. But out at Borroloola when I got there, there was Virgil and Homer and Nero and Pompey and Cicero and Hitler and Stalin and Lenin and Trotsky. So the names were pretty colourful and they are to this day.

Peter Forrest: It's interesting that some of those names were a lot more respectful than others that you might find in other places. It was probably nicer to call someone Virgil or Homer-or even Trotsky-instead of, say, Dogface or Flourbag, which were some of the alternatives. So it does indicate that there was a warmer relationship, a more respectful relationship there, do you think, Ted?

Ted Egan: Oh yes. Absolutely. And a lot of people insist that all whites must have been bastards and all blackfellas would have been all noble savages in those days. But the truth is that a pretty healthy mutual respect had been established, because it was still possible to get a shovel spear right through you if you offended Aboriginal society. And it was certainly possible to be shot by white people if you did the wrong thing among whites. Particularly for Aboriginals to get shot.

Jan Wositzky: That was Ted Egan and Peter Forrest. At Borroloola I also enjoyed the company of Isaac Isaacs, named after an Australian Governor General, otherwise known as Isaac Walayumguma.

And the oral tradition that I found alive in Borroloola was the Yijan-the Dreaming stories of Yanyuwa, Garrwa and Mara people who now live in the town. There by the McArthur River my eyes were opened to their ancient seat of learning and knowledge-the Genesis of their country as created by the dingo, the crow, the chicken hawk and the shark.

From them I also heard of how, when the quarterly boat was late, the whitefellas as well as the blacks lived on lillie roots and other bush tucker, and how on Fridays the Welfare men, like Ted Egan, would supply them with tea, sugar, jam, flour and vitamin tablets. They spoke fondly of those old time whitefellas, like Roger Jose and Jack Mulholland, and they showed me their graves. But one who caught them alive, was the now famous filmmaker, David Attenborough.

His film is called The Hermits of Borroloola. The first of the old library men that Attenborough spoke to was the publican Jack Mulholland. But first, he came across the other creatures, who were less than human, but nevertheless were still into the books.

David Attenborough: White ants chewed their way through the entire library. Only one volume survives: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis. Its title page is still easily legible, but inside the termites have eaten most of the holy man's words.

Life ebbed away from Borroloola. But it never entirely left it. For some, the town was more attractive as a dead shell than it would have been had it grown and flourished. The last keeper of the hotel never left it. He's an Irishman and his name is Jack Mulholland.

Jack Mulholland: No, no. I stopped one wet here. Joined the library up here and put in about three or four months' reading.

David Attenborough: Did you-what did you read?

Jack Mulholland: Oh, not them all, but quite a few of them.

David Attenborough: What sort of thing?

Jack Mulholland: Oh, well, they had almost a complete set of W.W. Jacobs. And I like Jacobs. And I read all those.

David Attenborough: What else?

Jack Mulholland: And also-oh, various other books, I've forgotten them now-I remember reading one medical book.

David Attenborough: Did you?

Jack Mulholland: And after I'd read the medical book I reckoned I suffered from every disease known to man. I liked the place while I was here. And then I had this offer to manage the public house here and I took it up and came over this way.

David Attenborough: Is that a full time job?

Jack Mulholland: Well yes. You had to be here all the time.

David Attenborough: Yeah, but I mean was it a busy job?

Jack Mulholland: Oh definitely no. No, you could-plenty of time to sleep. Plenty of time to read. Plenty of time to eat.

David Attenborough: How many guests do you reckon you'd get at any one time?

Jack Mulholland: At one time-oh, never more than one. And I don't think there'd be more than about four or five all the time I've been here. While it was a hotel.

David Attenborough: What do you mean, at any one time? Four or five guests at all?

Jack Mulholland: At all.

David Attenborough: What, total?

Jack Mulholland: Total.

David Attenborough: No wonder it closed. Jack, what do you reckon keeps a man in this country? It must be a pretty lonely sort of life.

Jack Mulholland: I've never been lonely in my life. There's always been so much in life. I could never honestly say I was lonely. I've lived for years on my own in the desert. Haven't seen anyone for months. But I've never been lonely. The trees are company and the birds and all the rest of it.

David Attenborough: Jack, how do you fill your days?

Jack Mulholland: Most of the time I'm in the bush. Got an old truck there, I make periodic visits out into the scrub, prospecting.

David Attenborough: Prospecting? What are you looking for?

Jack Mulholland: Well I'm supposed to be looking for copper or gold, silver lead or something like that, but I'm looking for contentment, mostly.

David Attenborough: For contentment.

Jack Mulholland: Yeah.

Jan Wositzky: David Attenborough next visited the Mad Fiddler, who lived by the lagoon in a bark hut and was but rarely seen, preferring to stay inside playing his violin. Then, it was on to Roger Jose, of whom Douglas Lockwood wrote, 'a philosopher, gentleman-in-hiding with a tea cosy for a fez and sandals tied to his feet with rags; a man who might have stepped straight out of the Old Testament.'

David Attenborough: The last of the hermits of Borroloola is its oldest inhabitant, Roger Jose. No-one knows how old he is, and Roger himself has been claiming that he's sixty-eight for at least the last five years. With him, lives Biddy, his wife, who catches fish for him in the river and cooks his meals. Every morning he fetches water and chops wood so that he can have a fire to keep himself warm during the cold nights. His house is extremely odd. A circular construction of corrugated iron, with no windows, and only a small opening cut in its side to serve as a door. It must be suffocatingly hot during the heat of the day, but then Roger spends most of his time outside, sitting down by the wall of his extraordinary house, thinking.

David Attenborough: Roger, this is a rather curious house. What exactly is it?

Roger Jose: It's a tank for conservation of rain water.

David Attenborough: When did you first come to Borroloola?

Roger Jose: A little later than this, about this time in the storm time.

Roger Jose: No, well that would hardly be honest. I've mostly always had a mate. A female. And prior to that I lived in civilisation. I got married about 30. I hadn't developed this superiority complex, you know. I found out that I couldn't get any better company than my own, by then, you know. [laughter] And I'd already learned enough off my fellows, savvy?

David Attenborough: A lot of people, I suppose, would find this unendurable, Roger, for a long period of time.

Roger Jose: That's obvious. It's overpowering for some men, eh?

David Attenborough: It would overpower them.

Roger Jose: It is overpowering, but I doubt it would ever overpower me. But like I said, I'm not an example of complete loneliness, see? Old Biddy, although she's primitive and all that, she's company. Yes. And the sort I like. She won't argue the point with me. [laughter] And moreover is not a bit interested in what I've got to say. [laughter]

David Attenborough: There was a library here at Borroloola, wasn't there? What sort of things do you read?

Roger Jose: Nearly anything. Read the labels on jam tins. Yes, really, I'm a good reader once I start.

David Attenborough: But Borroloola's not the first place you'd think of as having a library.

Roger Jose: Indeed no.

David Attenborough: Was it a big library?

Roger Jose: There was at least twenty-nine hundred books in it. There may have been more. I got a job rearranging them once. And I distinctly remember twenty-nine hundred.

David Attenborough: Who are your favourite authors, Roger?

Roger Jose: Firstly I would put Gray.

David Attenborough: Thomas Gray?

Roger Jose: Gray's 'Elegy.' Or the 'Lincolnshire Poet.' I forget when he died.

David Attenborough: And who else?

Roger Jose: Oh, well, I would put him first and foremost. You must understand I can only read English. That's all. But I don't want to read anything else. In a way, I would like to read anything that was better than Gray's 'Elegy,' I would.

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,And all the air a solemn stillness holds,Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;[...]Beneath those rugger elms, that yew-tree's shade,Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Ted Egan: Ah, well he was a little bloke with piercing blue eyes and a long beard. A white man, but he was burnt almost black by the sun, and Roger had a theory on everything and his theory was that he'd gradually turned black because he'd had two Aboriginal wives, and he said this dark skin of his was brought on by osmosis. But his name was Roger Jose, and so there's probably a Spanish connection there which accounts for the darkening in his skin, but he was burnt this lovely mahogany colour which looked good against his white beard and long hair. And he was the only one there who didn't have a fancy nickname.

Everyone else had a fancy nickname and there was Kitson, he was the Mad Fiddler; and there was the Whispering Baritone and the Reluctant Saddler, and Charlie Main the missionary was called the White Stallion because he'd been caught one day by a missionary-he was a missionary himself-and he was seducing this-or perhaps raping even-this Aboriginal girl and the missionary threw a dish-full of flour over him. And for ever afterwards he was called the White Stallion. But Roger didn't have a nickname and I eventually wrote a song about that fact, because I heard someone refer to him as the Death Adder, and I thought that wasn't a very good nickname for a good bloke like Roger.

While I was there at Borroloola, Arthur Calwell came in one day on an aeroplane, and Arthur Calwell had his faults as a politician, but he was a very accomplished scholar on Chinese history and stuff like that.

Jan Wositzky: And he was the Leader of the Opposition.

Ted Egan: He was the head of the Opposition, yeah, and he got talking with Roger on Chinese history and the various dynasties and it was fascinating stuff. And he said, 'My God, he knows as much as I do.'

Jan Wositzky: Doug Lockwood quotes that Roger Jose had read the library starting on the right-hand side at the top and proceeding right through to the bottom, and had read every volume. So was he a great thinker, or could he just quote?

Ted Egan: Oh no, Roger was a great brain, there's no risk. A lovely man, and hugely intelligent, and he could talk with authority on any subject.

Jan Wositzky: That was Ted Egan. But not everybody was proud to know old Roger Jose. Nicholas Jose, in his book Black Sheep tells how his family first heard of Roger Jose.

Nicholas Jose: Well I heard about Roger Jose when I was a child. Reports started appearing in the press of this eccentric so-called hermit of Borroloola who lived in a water tank with his Aboriginal wife, or wives. The brother of my great-grandfather at the time was a well-known historian, and I think what happened is that he claimed to be related to that historian, Arthur Jose. And then it just got twisted in the telling over the years and he became more directly linked to my great-grandfather. But if he's connected to Arthur Jose, he's a relation anyway, of course.

Jan Wositzky: So do you take him as a relation?

Nicholas Jose: Well I've certainly adopted him, let's put it that way. My speculation is that he is a relation.

Jan Wositzky: We know very little of Roger Jose in literature except that he walked to Borroloola in 1916 from Cunnamulla in Queensland, which sounds like it would have taken about a year. What else can you tell us about him then?

Nicholas Jose: Well he seems to have been born in Picton, NSW, where Arthur Jose was an itinerant lecturer in the 1890s and Roger was most likely born in 1896. So he would have been about nineteen or twenty when he walked to Borroloola. Remembering that that's the First World War and that most Australian men of that age were expected to enlist and go off to Gallipoli or Flanders Field.

Jan Wositzky: Is there an implication there that walking to Borroloola was easier than going to France?

Nicholas Jose: I think so. Roger remained a convinced pacifist to the end of his days. He turned his back on empire and all its works, and I think that was part of the motivation in going to Borroloola. But I also think he was attracted by the famous Borroloola library, because he was a person who was very interested in books and writing himself. The fame of these three thousand books was widespread, and I think it really was the biggest and best library in the whole of northern Australia at that time, and so it was a magnet for someone like Roger Jose.

Jan Wositzky: I've always assumed, I think, that the library was an accident in Borroloola, but in the drafts of your book, Black Sheep, you talk of a craving for learning that seemed to burn strongly there. So I'm getting the impression from reading what you've written that it came as much from a groundswell of deep interest in learning as what I previously thought just an accident.

Nicholas Jose: Yeah. I think the idea was that if it was going to be a real town, it had to have a bit of culture. And what culture meant in those days, the first thing was a library-to make it part of a whole movement of libraries across the British Empire. You know, and you go to many an old Australian town and you'll see the Institute of Arts building still standing. Well that was often the library. Every town had to have one. And Borroloola, when it began in the 1880s and 90s, saw itself as having this great future. It was going to be a deep water port, it was going to rival Darwin. I mean these dreams didn't last very long, as you know, and by the early nineteen hundreds they'd come crashing down completely and the European population of the area had shrunk to just a tiny handful of eccentric people. But of that tiny handful, some of them seemed to like books. And so the library continued. It wasn't just the initial donations. They continued to seek funding and to buy books for this library for quite a few decades after that, until-it was really the second War that finally put an end to it-when the last books were evacuated to Darwin and in the mop-up after the War in Darwin, they got dispersed.

Jan Wositzky: The other delight I found in reading what you'd written was that you had explored the lists of what was in the library-the booklist. And you described it as 'an Edwardian library.' Can you explain, what does 'an Edwardian library' mean?

Nicholas Jose: A lot of it was the kind of literature you needed to be a part of the British Empire, or western civilisation, really; as it was conceived at that time around the start of the 20th century, the Edwardian period. And so there were the classics: Homer and Virgil and Shakespeare and Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then there were lots of novels, you know, there were the Brontes and there was Charles Dickens. But then there was a heavy quotient of books of manly adventure, you know, the Rudyard Kiplings and Robert Louis Stevensons. Which would have been promoting a myth of Empire which these people in Borroloola in some ways were foot soldiers for but in other ways they were actually running away from. So I find that very interesting about the library.

Jan Wositzky: Roger Jose was quoted often as saying he was out there, like many others, to evade life's troubles. But at the same time they were exploring the full gamut of human experience through this library.

Nicholas Jose: And what interests me is that I think they must have had some part in the ordering of the books themselves. There were bookshops in London and committees in Australia that chose books for these remote communities. But when you look at the titles, there's a book called Marooned in Australia, and another book called Disenchantment. One of the last books, one I've actually seen, called Sand and Sea in Arabia, also suggests that they were drawn to books about exotic places and places that were really falling off the edge of the map.

Jan Wositzky: And you're saying that they had a choice in what arrived there?

Nicholas Jose: Yes.

Jan Wositzky: Which is one of the appeals you mentioned, that this was learning free of a pedagogic system that you would have to go through, were you doing this learning in a university.

Nicholas Jose: Yes. It was really like an open university, in a way. And even after the library had vanished, they still held symposiums on the river bank, discussing issues that the books had given them material about-such as 'Karl Marx, right or wrong?'

Jan Wositzky: And these symposiums at Borroloola, they kept on going right through to the 1950s and one who was there to witness them was Ted Egan.

Ted Egan: Well when I went there, there were organised debates every Sunday morning, and you knew that the debate started at about 10 o'clock every Sunday morning and at the end of today's debate next week's topic was set and while there weren't any more books to read, people still had that topic to think about during the ensuing week. And I'm told by people like Roger Jose and Jack Mulholland that the debates have been going on for over twenty years.

Roger Jose was the mainstay. Albert Morecombe, Jack Bailey, Robbo the Lair, Andy Anderson if ever he came in from Manankurra. I used to drift down every Sunday morning to have a listen and have a drink, if there was anything to drink.

Jan Wositzky: Sounds a bit like church.

Ted Egan: Well that was my introduction. I'd been there a couple of days and old Robbo said to me, 'You coming to the church service on Sunday?' And I knew he wasn't talking about a church service, so I said, 'Where's it on?' He said, 'Down at Mork's place, under the mango trees.' So I go down and I sat down on this first Sunday and someone passed me a bottle of metho and I thought, 'Gawd, I'm amongst a bunch of deros here.' So I passed it on and thought , 'Oh, I'll just drift off in a minute.' But then the debate started. And it was good stuff.

Jan Wositzky: And what was the topic?

Ted Egan: I forget, on that particular day. But I remember a few of them: 'Will Buddhism survive?' The best ever, though, that I remember, and it stuck in my mind ever since, was the debate one day on the relative merits of Gray and Browning, and Roger Jose was a great Gray fan and he'd get up and he'd give you great bursts of it. The Gray supporters won handsomely and the Brownings had nowhere to go.

Jan Wositzky: Can you, Ted, remember any of the poems that Roger Jose used on that day?

Ted Egan: He certainly did the 'Elegy', which was the only one I recall. But he gave little bites of various other poems. And he tucked in a couple of his own, which were just immense. And David Attenborough got Roger on film eventually. He must have heard about this from me, I think, and Roger gives a little punchy thing of his own - about six lines, about the aftermath of a massacre.

Roger Jose: Would you like to hear it?

David Attenborough: I would.

Roger Jose: Wouldn't bore you?

David Attenborough: No.

Roger Jose: Here doddering in senile decay,My memory harks blithely away To pink dawns, when I'd creep On blacks fast asleep And knock 'em hell west and all of a heap.A bravo, just hired to slay.

That their weapons could scarcely compare Didn't cause me much care,Nor the fact that they slept While sheer murder crept,My red embers guided and no sentinel kept Them apprised of the sinister shapes lurking there.

And any who're prone to declare This one-sided fight wasn't fair,Should have seen the bold bids Made by women and kids,Whom we slew for the benefit of opulent yids Reclining in far Belgrave Square

Roger Jose: I couldn't afford to stop, you know-Reclining in far Belgrave Square...

Ted Egan: He was an amazing bloke, and like Bill, he'd been in gaol at Borroloola and he'd read the books and he could give you great bursts of Virgil's 'Aeneid' in what seemed to me to be pretty good Latin, and he loved the 'Rubiyat of Omar Kyam' and 'Write me as One Who Loves His Fellow Man,' and it was a joy to be among 'em.

Fate is opposed, the god makes deaf the hero's Kind ears. As when, along the Alps, north winds Will strain against each other to root out With blasts - now on this side, now that - a stout Oak tree whose wood is full of years; the roar Is shattering, the trunk is shaken, and High branches scatter on the ground; but it Still grips the rocks; as steeply as it thrusts Its crown into the upper air, so deep The roots it reaches down to Tartarus:No less than this, the hero: he is battered On this side and on that by assiduous words;He feels care in his mighty chest, and yet His mind cannot be moved; the tears fall, useless.

Jan Wositzky

: The was Virgil's 'Aeneid,' and before that a poem from Roger Jose from which it might be imagined that the standard of the times, The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion was also on the shelves in Borroloola. And so the knowledge contained in the Borroloola library passed from the page to the minds of the so-called hermits who lived there and they, like the paper, have gone to dust.

In the twenty years I've been visiting Borroloola, it's gone from a sleepy hollow to a wild town again. The pub has reopened, the streets are awash with beer. Closing time often means a brawl and sometimes the floor of the pub swimming pool was carpeted with broken glass. And as the old Aboriginal people pass on, the Yanyuwa, Mara and the Garrwa people have worked with writers like myself to commit their oral stories to video, tape and print, and to save them for ever in libraries.

But to finish the story, let's go back to the beginning. Everyone has always said that the Borroloola library was a Carnegie library. Billy Harney writes that the name was written above the door when he first entered in 1919. And the town has always been proud of its connection with the world's most famous philanthropist, and charmed by the possibility that everyone could be as learned as Roger Jose or Bill Harney, and have the time to be so.

So I looked up the website for the patron saint of libraries, and it said that Andrew Carnegie donated to two thousand, five hundred and nine libraries around the world, but Borroloola was not on the list. Maybe they've never heard of Borroloola. They should have, that's for sure. Concerned with their oversight, I turned to Peter Forrest for the thoughts of a hard-headed historian.

Peter Forrest: Well, it certainly wasn't the Carnegie library in the first place. Power approached a lot of people throughout Australia, but he made no approach to Andrew Carnegie, who was of course an American philanthropist. And he did, later on, endow a large number of libraries.

How it came about was this, I think - and again, I don't want to be too dogmatic - but when library facilities were being upgraded in Darwin in the 1930s, the Commonwealth Government obtained financial support from the Carnegie Foundation and a number of books were put into the library in Darwin which carried an acknowledgment in a book plate put in the front of the title pages of the book, indicating that it had been provided with financial support from the Carnegie Foundation.

Now these books found their way into Territory libraries generally, and from Darwin they were circulated and rotated to remote places, including Borroloola.Many of them stayed at Borroloola, and that is why there were books out at Borroloola that carried this plate indicating that they were from the Carnegie Foundation. But they weren't part of the original foundation of the library back at the turn of the century.

But people-and I think this was popularised by the writer Ernestine Hill-gained the impression that the whole thing was a Carnegie Foundation library and it was always called, as a matter of shorthand, the Carnegie library.

Jan Wositzky: Ted, Peter's good hard information here takes a little bit of wind out of the sails of the legend of the Carnegie library, I'd say.

Ted Egan: Oh, but I think the fact that there was a library there is great. I've known for quite a while that Peter has done the research on this, as he has with so much other stuff. It'll just add to the story-that we once called it the Carnegie library and this is the truth as we established it.

Peter Forrest: I think that's right, Ted. It doesn't matter to me or to you, I'm sure, whether it was the Carnegie library or what. The fact is that there was this amazing library there-which for a time, incidentally, was far and away the biggest library in the Territory, the whole of the Northern Territory-and it had such a tremendous influence on so many people and that influence spread pretty far and wide. We cited Bill Harney and I've said that I think he was certainly one of the best writers ever to describe the people and places of the Territory, and that wouldn't have happened had it not been for this amazing library. So it's a notable part of our history, whatever we might want to call it.

Ted Egan: And the ongoing debate, we should have done this at Borroloola, the three of us with a bottle rum.

Jan Wositzky: And the last word we leave to the white ants, courtesy of Nicholas Jose.

Nicholas Jose: The fantastic things about that landscape in the Northern Territory, and it features today in a lot of Aboriginal paintings of the area by people like Ginger Riley, is the ant hills, or termite mounds. And I like to think that some small part of that has come from the ants or the termites that have eaten the Borroloola library and totally digested it and made it into something else, which is these ant mounds. Apparently when white ants eat a bit of newspaper or something you will find traces of that newspaper inside the tunnels in the ant bed, so it may well be that a few pages of Henry James or whoever ended up in some ant bed at Borroloola.

Ramona Koval Nicholas Jose's new book Black Sheep, set in the Gulf of Carpentaria, will be out in September. Peter Forrest is the creator of The Year of the Outback special segments broadcasting daily across Australia on local ABC Radio. Ted Egan, the Bard of the Territory, will be found entertaining in Alice Springs. You can't miss him. Readings by Barry Clark and Anne McInerney. Technical production by Brendan O'Neil. And the David Attenborough interviews were from the BBC 1963 film, The Hermits of Borroloola. Bill Harney's yarns came from ABC Radio archives. This program was written and presented by Jan Wositzky.